Friday, November 7, 2014

Scientific evidence including the necessity of a cause outside the universe, the fact of the incredible

complexity and apparent fine-tuning of the universe for life like ourselves, and the wonderful complexity of the human DNA information system recommends to us the high probability that there is a God. But what sort of God is this?

I recently read Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Nonmoral Nature." Now, Gould is one of my favorite science writers, so I was interested in his conclusion as well as his observations on nature. What can it tell us about the God who made it? His conclusion was that we cannot derive from nature any indication about the moral character of God. His observations were all related to the pain and suffering that is fundamental to the natural world and which would be, if one chose to make the case, evidence for a immoral God. Gould does not make that case, however. His final position was that nature just is. To consider the death and pain evident in the natural world in an anthropomorphic way is to read into nature something that is not there. It just is.

Others who have written about the essay, however, have derived more from the same evidence Gould presents. Their conclusions are that God, if there be such, is not moral. Indeed he is immoral by the standards of morality of the authors. So if God created nature and nature is vicious, would not this God be vicious also?

I lean toward Gould's position rather than the latter, but I would like to suggest that there is more we can derive about God than Gould allows. (To be fair, Gould's argument has to do with the somewhat common attempt to derive the goodness of God from nature and, at that, only a small slice of nature. It is a limited argument.)

I begin with the observation that the universe had a cause and that cause is possibly if not probably the being we call God. First, the cause had to be able to produce the universe. That would require great power or authority. Even if the cause of the universe was an impersonal quantum or energy fluctuation in a prior universe, the cause would have to be powerful. It would have to be on the scale of the Big Bang itself.

Secondly, we observe that the universe functions according to rather finely tuned and universal physical laws. In addition, these laws work together to produce a complex, well balanced, long lasting universe that has existed for as much as 14 Billion years and, we project, will continue to exist in a functioning state for at least as long. As an example, gravity, one of those universal laws, has to be quite precisely the strength it is for the universe to expand as it has over

time. A very little stronger and the universe would have collapsed early on. A very little weaker and the universe would not develop galaxies and stars. Neither universe would be anything like ours. So, we can derive that this God who caused the universe has to have great knowledge and wisdom.

Next, we observe that this earth of ours is a remarkable place. The conditions that obtain here are not only many and interrelated but necessary in almost every case for there to life at all like ourselves. That is called the anthropic principle. However, that alone does not make God necessary. Some scientists conclude that we are just lucky and that, in any event, if those conditions did not prevail we would not be here to observe it. Others see more going on.

About fifteen years ago biologist Michael J. Denton wrote a book with the title Nature's Destiny. His argument, well supported by factual evidence, was that there was a destiny built into the universe. That destiny would produce eventually life something like ourselves on some world much like ours. Denton was not a theist. But he was convinced that the universe by its makeup displayed some purpose. If that is so, then we can derive from nature that God, if there is such, would have to be both highly intelligent and ingenious in the design he created in the universe, a design that inevitably leads to sentient life.

As an aside, it would be interesting to speculate whether there are other worlds on which sentient life might be found. There is no reason to reject that possibility since the very nature of nature is productive of life.

But back to our task. What of the that sentient and wonderfully imaginative life? It would seem reasonable to assume that the effect of a cause cannot be greater than the cause. If we think, if we are imaginative, if we have a sense of right and wrong, if we have a will, it suggests that this God who is our cause also has volition, is moral, creative, and obviously sentient. All that is to say that he is a person, for those are the characteristics that define a person.They are the features that define us as persons.

Now, what of Gould's observations about the cruelty of nature? Does nature argue that God is cruel? Gould would not take the argument that far. But he took it far enough. Nature is not immoral; it is nonmoral. The natural world other than ourselves cannot tell us about the nature of God. We, however, are moral. Does anyone doubt that? Virtually everyone makes judgments daily about the morality of the acts of others and their own. We may not agree on what is moral or immoral, though there are some basic agreements, but there is plenty of evidence for our moral nature. God, then, must be moral also if we his creations are moral.

It would be possible to go further, but at this point we can draw these conclusions about this God who is the ultimate cause. He is powerful. He is creative and imaginative. He is intelligent and wise. He is moral. He has volition. He is personal.

But of course, that picture may fit many different presuppositions. Allah, Yahweh, and possibly some of the gods of the Asian religions could fit those characteristics. So, is it possible to decide based on reasonable examination of the evidence which god is God? I think so, but that waits another blog.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

In a recent discussion with a variety of posters on the CNN
website I heard over and over again that they do not believe in the existence
of God because there is no scientific evidence for God’s existence. I find that
particularly surprising because in my investigation over 20 years I have found
that there is more than enough evidence.

So I pondered why the evidence available was not considered evidence.

One reason seems to be that they believe there is no direct
evidence. By that they mean someone whohas seen God and whose testimony can be examined in depth for it
reliability, though few of my atheist friends know what criteria to apply to a witness and to personal testimony. They are simply judging subjectively
rather than applying rigorous criteria and are sure that this rebuttal would be
sufficient: no one can see God, so his existence cannot be proved.

Most Christian theists would counter with the statement that
Jesus, being God, was seen and we have the testimony of a quite a number of
witnesses. I like that. But that begs the question: does God in fact exist. We must be convinced that there is a God before we can examine the
witnesses of Jesus to determine if he is God.So it is crucial to the argument to show that it is highly probable
based on scientific evidence that God exists.

That brings me to the second reason my atheist friends do
not believe in the existence of God; they don’t believe the evidence is
sufficient to prove God’s existence. I’d like to challenge that idea, but it
must wait until we determine what “sufficient” evidence would be.

In science there are few absolutes because all scientific
conclusions, whether they are hypotheses, theories, or laws are based on
observations and arrived at by inductive reasoning.Because it is not possible to collect all the
facts, it is also not possible to be 100% certain of the conclusions drawn from
the facts observed.

But that does not prevent scientists from creating hypotheses.
They know that a collection of many facts may provide sufficient evidence for a
conclusion that is highly probable, even if not absolute. In fact, a hypothesis
is necessary because facts by themselves mean nothing. Meaning must be derived
from facts via inference. They consider the facts they have as sufficient if
the quantity of facts is large and the number of facts that might lead to a
different conclusion is small. If that criterion is met, scientists conclude
(or believe based on the facts) that their hypothesis is accurate.

So, to answer my atheist friends, “sufficient” evidence for
the existence of God would be facts which taken together and in a large enough
number would provide a basis for the inference or hypothesis that God exists.
That, of course, assumes that there are no or few scientific facts that could
lead to the contrary conclusion that God does not exist or facts that could be
reasonably explained by a different hypothesis. Reasonableness is, of course,
the critical condition.

So, what are the scientific facts? The first is that from
observation and via inductive reasoning we are almost all convinced that
everything that begins has a cause.In
fact, science would be impossible if that were not so. But we don’t need to be
scientists to be convinced of that hypothesis. If we arrive home one evening to
find a window broken, every one of us would look for the cause because we are
absolutely convinced there has to be a cause.

If we come upon a painted vase in the forest, we would never
assume that it just appeared out of the sky with no cause. We would all ask how
it got there. We would even go beyond that. We would never conclude that it
exists without a cause. Every vase had a maker.We would reasonably ask who made it. And we would expect that there is
an answer.

So too with the universe. If it is, and few would argue that
it is not (and even they would have to agree that exists at the very least in
our minds) then it is our expectation that there was a cause. The only
exception to that is if we find the universe is eternal. (And that, by the way,
is the only way to truly falsify the hypothesis that God exists.)

The idea that the universe is eternal was, in fact, the conviction
of many scientists a century ago. But then Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble and
a host of others produced scientific and mathematical evidence that the
universe was expanding. The reasonable conclusion, which virtually all now accept,
is that if it is expanding there must have been a beginning.Little evidence points to any other
conclusion.

As a digression here, it once was suggested that the expanding universe would reach the end of expansion and collapse to start the cycle over again. That could mean the universe is eternal. But recent discoveries show that the rate of expansion is increasing rather than decreasing. That means we are on a one-way trip to oblivion rather than on a round-trip to a new beginning.

If the universe had a beginning, there must be a cause.
There have been a variety of causes proposed. Our universe might have been
spawned through quantum fluctuations or from a prior universe. Or maybe God
created it. With just these bare facts to work with those hypotheses have a low
probability. But there are additional facts. What we all believe is that it had
a cause.

The universe is highly complex. That is a fact no one
disputes. The particular level of complexity includes a set of many conditions
which are particularly finely tuned. For example, gravity could vary in only
the smallest degree from the strength we now observe or the universe would
either have quickly collapsed or would not have formed stars and galaxies.
Gravity along with the other conditions necessary for this universe to exist as
it is are facts which demand an explanation for their existence.

In the case of the laws that govern the universe, which are
among the facts in the list, those laws must have their cause in something
other than the universe they caused. There have been a number of suggested
causes for the laws of the universe which along with gravity include entropy,
the weak and strong nuclear forces and others. One is that we are just lucky.
There may be an infinite number of universes in which other laws prevail, and
we happen to live in the one in which these laws prevail. It would be fair to
ask then for evidence for these other universes. Or maybe a highly intelligent
being designed and created the universe.

The third piece of scientific evidence is the extraordinary
complexity of life on this planet. All living things have DNA (or RNA). In even
the simplest of living things the complexity of the DNA that directs the cells
how to develop is incredible. The DNA in humans is the most complex thing we
know of in the universe.

In addition, DNA is a kind of biological code very much like
written language. In other words, it is information. Information is known only to be the product of
intelligence.And information as complex
and specific as the DNA/RNA in the simplest form of life we know of is
unthinkable apart from an intelligence producing it. It is like taking a
million individual letters, throwing them up in the air and hoping for them to
fall into place as a Charles Dickens novel. It simply won’t happen no matter
how many times they are thrown.

But what if among some of those fallen letters there is a
word, suppose the. Leaving that word
intact we throw the letters again. And another word appears, suppose dirty. Can’t Great Expectations be created that way? No. The analogy fails at that point because
none of those words mean anything by themselves. There is no information. So in
real life it would be at least necessary for a sentence to appear from the
thrown letters. Only then is there information. But even given that, there is
not enough time in the universe for a meaningful book to be created by this
process. At the very best there would be a mass of random letters and a very few random words which were not connected in sentences and would mean nothing. Chance cannot create meaningfulinformation.

So, it is reasonable to ask how DNA came to exist and how it
could be as complex as it is. There are a variety of explanations. The one most
often proposed is that DNA became more complex over time via the evolutionary
process by which new features are added to existing ones. We’ve seen this fails
even if there is a selection process. There is not enough time and the chance
is far too small. But even if we were to accept that explanation (it requires
acceptance without sufficient evidence) it begs the question where the
first DNA/RNA came from.

The proposals for the beginning of what would be life are
many. None of them, however, have been scientifically demonstrated. So
believing any of these proposals to be accurate requires a suspension of
disbelief in any critical observer. (I should say that the stance of most
scientists is skepticism. Otherwise we’d still believe flies spontaneously
appear on rotting meat.)

The other possibility is that God designed and directed the
existence of life and the complexity of the life we know.

Is this scientific evidence? Obviously it is. It is the very
same evidence scientists puzzle over and create experiments to analyze and
which they use to test hypotheses. And there is more. I have simply stopped
here because this is sufficient to make the point that there is scientific
evidence from which we can infer with a high degree of probability that God
exists.

To recap, the God hypothesis is a possible explanation for
all of the facts I have presented. There is no single other hypothesis that
does that.That would make the God
hypothesis more probable than the
others. It is not absolute proof. But that is not what science produces. However, there are two other considerations.

The first is the inability to test the hypothesis as we
usually can with a scientific hypothesis. However, there are many scientific
theories that have been tested only by applying the test of probability to what
we have observed. We generally accept those theories until the phenomena
can be explained better another way. That is why the stance of science is always a bit tentative and never absolute.

Finally, there is the question of how God might have done
this. What was the mechanism of creation?

The best answer to that is, I believe, an analogy. An author
creates a world as he writes a novel. He creates characters to live in that
world and he creates the events that happen in the story. Where do they come
from? They come from mind. He wills them to be. They exist in the mind of the
author before they are ever given a kind of life on the pages of a book. They exist in
the mind of the author even if they never are written.

In a similar way, God can be conceived of as the author of
this story that is our life and our universe. We and all that is are the
result of his willing it to be. And that is what the Bible tells us. It says
that God spoke and things came into being.

That challenges the idea that reality is the material
universe we are acquainted with. The characters in a story are not real, after
all. They are only imagined. Taken a little further, it suggests that the only
non-contingent reality is God. It is interesting that recently there have been
theorists who have noticed the similarity between the universe and a digitally
created game, a game in which the characters have no reality of their own, but
that must wait another blog.

As a conclusion to this discussion, the scientific evidence
convinces me that the God hypothesis is the best and most probably. But that leaves me with only the existence of
God. It would be interesting to reason what sort of God might have created the
universe and life within it. That will be the subject of a future discussion.